Voyou's recent post on the desire to productively misread reminded me that I'd written a piece on 'militant reading' a couple of years ago - although it is related to some of the work I did in the now forever bound-and-trussed Pig-h-D, this piece on reading didn't make the final cut. So here it is now, replete with pictures of women reading (possibly my favourite subject for representational art ever), taken (mostly) from a book I once very joyfully received.

Introduction

Is there anything interesting to say about the concept of reading? Is there something of worth at stake in differentiating alternative stances, or is there, in fact, little to say concerning this most necessary of philosophical and literary preconditions? Perhaps we will always fall prey to unnecessary generalisations, banalities, or worse, pedagogical prescriptions regarding what we might mean by 'reading', that most 'obvious' and yet, in comparison to its more illustrious counterpart, writing, little discussed of activities.

Whether we inevitably proliferate banalities on this subject remains to be seen. However, I will argue that for at least two of the 20th century's most divergent, though temporally proximate, of philosophical and political thinkers, namely Sartre and Althusser, a quite specific notion of 'reading' in each case forms an explicit backdrop to the stage upon which they are more commonly seen to fight, namely, the torturous ground of humanism and anti-humanism. The same ground that continues to inform and, arguably, misinform much of contemporary political and philosophical thought today. In the attempt, then, to delineate the main characteristics of both a Sartrean and Althusserian conception of reading - taken in the first case from Sartre's collection of essays entitled What is Literature? from 1948, and from various essays and longer works by Althusser, particularly, and most obviously, perhaps, Reading Capital from 1965 - I shall also be putting into play some of the broader problematics of what Althusser terms 'the Humanist Controversy', the set of debates that Dominique Janicaud, for one, interrogates – and this is taken from L'homme va-t-il dépasser l'humain?: 'why,' he asks 'did the question of man, quite suddenly in the 1960s, especially in France and in somewhat polemical terms …crystallise into a critical reflection upon humanism?' Why indeed? And what role does the conception of reading in Sartre and Althusser play in their understanding of this category of humanism, as a defence or as a polemical attack thereupon?



Two quotes to begin with, both from Sartre's What is Literature?:

If I appeal to my readers so that we may carry the enterprise which I have begun to a successful conclusion, it is self-evident that I consider him as a pure freedom, as an unconditional activity; thus, in no case can I address myself to his passiveness, that is, try to affect him(p. 34).

And the second:

One cannot write without a public and without a myth – without a certain public which historical circumstances have made, without a certain myth of literature which depends to a very great extent upon the demand of this public. In a word, the author is in a situation, like all other men. But his writings, like every human project, simultaneously enclose, specify, and surpass this situation (pp. 111-112).

Here, in these two quotes, we have more or less a summation of the Sartrean-existentialist conception of reading, understood from both the perspective of the situation of the writer and that of the reader. It would immediately be easy here to criticize Sartre for adopting a didactic tone, for imagining a ready-made readership, mutely awaiting dictates from on high, i.e. from Sartre himself, or from someone like him, before any understanding of this 'specific situation', whatever that might be, can be reached. However, Sartre's imagined readership is undoubtedly more complex. Rather than understanding reading in terms of its affectivity, i.e. the direct action of the text on a passive student, the reader is in no way merely a blank recipient for Sartre. The end to which the book aims is not to bludgeon its reader to death with didacticism, but to appeal, quite simply, to his freedom; his capacity, in other words, to transcend his situation. The Sartrean-existentialist conception of reading we find here is thus fairly consistent with the more general notion of freedom at the heart of Being and Nothingness and Existentialism and Humanism, the active choosing of choice itself, that which characterises nothing other than the being, or equally, the nothingness of man. It is in this way that the reader can be described as an 'unconditional activity', the one who has the potential to act, to choose, he is, in the language of Being and Nothingness, condemned to be free.



However, what distinguishes the community of readers in What is Literature? from their isolation as atomised individuals is precisely that; their community. Referring to Kant's 'Kingdom of Ends' in which it is now the reading of texts that constitutes the ideality of the Kingdom, Sartre describes how each reader reads as if on behalf of everyone else, i.e. universally. Ideally, he states, one writes for the universal reader, for all men: '...actual literature can only realise its full essence in a classless society.' This imagined community of egalitarian readers – imagined because their existence must remain closed off to one another – creates a kind of virtual 'group in fusion', an idea that prefigures some of the attempts to discuss the possibility of political group formations that so concerns Sartre in his later work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Not only, but the community of readers also testifies to, and indeed completes, the creation of the author. Another quote:

It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others ... Reading seems…to be the synthesis of perception and creation ... Reading is directed creation (pp. 30-31).

Thus, the author writes in order to address himself to the freedom of readers. But this freedom, unlike the more extreme pronouncements upon 'freedom' in Being and Nothingness, is a conditioned one. The more we as readers recognise our freedom as readers, by encountering the author's text, the more is demanded of us. This is where the power of literature lies for Sartre, in the dialectical dependence of reader and author. The content of the prose is here the contingent element of the relationship, strangely: this is what Sartre intends by that which is specific to the situation, that which is concrete, that which is 'useful'. It simply follows that literature – any literature – has a finite period of efficacy. Sartre is clearly unsubtle here in seeing a direct continuity between socio-political constraints, the epoch, and the 'commitment' literature is thus supposed to manifest in the face of whatsoever concrete situation. There is thus an existentialising of the book itself, and hence of the book's efficacy for the reader.



Sartre concludes What is Literature? with the claim: 'We stand for an ethics and an art of the finite (p. 238)'. Sartre’s emphatic utilitarianism of the dialectic of reading and writing, renders prose flatly propositional, and it is no surprise that he must restrict his discussion to prose alone, and block off, with a nod to Plato, all that he calls 'poetic': 'The empire of signs is prose,' he writes, 'poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music' (p. 4). Interestingly, Sartre makes no attempt to distinguish, within the category of prose, fiction from non-fiction, and any possible separation of fiction and factual writing is obfuscated from the start: 'The work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men' (p. 45). He we see quite clearly in what Sartre's humanism consists, i.e. the dependency upon the freedom of man, and on the freedom of a certain reading public. This humanism leads Sartre to imagine a kind of 'principle of freedom', by which '...the moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it cannot be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of ... man' (p. 46). The reading public can thus only be democratic and libertarian in nature, to a greater or lesser degree, no matter what the concrete circumstances are, or what the nature of the text is.



In summary, the Sartrean conception of reading can be characterised by four main traits:

1. Its insistence on the active element of the reader's situation, which reveals the universal element of his capacity: '...in the age of fatalism, we must reveal to the reader his power' (p. 216).

2. The continuity between a specific socio-politic situation and the relevance of the prose together with the concomitant refusal of the possibility of the usefulness of poetry to achieve this end.

3. The existential-experiential quality of reading: Sartre claims that 'Reading should not be mystical communion any more than it should be masturbation, but rather a companionship' (p. 203). It remains idealist: 'The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy'. The author writes, says Sartre, with the following question perpetually in mind: 'what would happen if everybody read what I wrote?' (p. 14).

4. The transitory relevance of literature to the age in which it appears: a text may sometimes 'outrun' the death of its author, like the courier of Marathon, who dies an hour before reaching Athens but nevertheless carries on running to deliver his message, but, for Sartre, the text can only ever 'make sense' within a given historical time. As he puts it, 'Books that are handed down from age to age are dead fruit' (p. 236). And, similarly, 'There is no guarantee that literature is immortal' (p. 220).

We can identify several problems with Sartre's understanding of reading, some of which will also serve to introduce Althusser's quite different approach. We can see that Sartre's discussion of literature in What is Literature? seems to consist of a series of explicit and implicit slippages between different registers and regions of experience, of the experience of literature and of the historical situatedness of literature. Literature is that which necessarily maintains a direct relation between the reader, the author, and the work: this relation to a reading public is, however, nothing other than a 'certain myth'. There is no account of why, or indeed, how, literature can ever direct the political action of its readers, other than purely formally, by revealing to them their freedom as readers. There seems to be an incommensurable gulf between the formal, politically democratic, experience of reading and the concrete situatedness that Sartre argues literature must reveal; Sartre is simply too quick to see a direct and transparent link between socio-political conditions and a certain responsibility of prose.



Furthermore, the slippages between the dialectic of the reader-author relation and the phenomenology of the reading experience can only mean that history and the epochal nature of texts remain confused – when exactly does the reading of a certain text become useless, and what does this mean for any account of the experience of reading? Is there not also a residual didacticism at work in Sartre's humanist account of reading, despite his privileging of the reader's freedom? We are still dealing with the language of essence, of the myth of an ideal readership. There is in Sartre's work, arguably, the assumption that the writer himself will always be a certain kind of person, but only the readership will change, or, indeed, vanish. 'We no longer know,' he remarks of the current situation, 'for whom to write' (p. 178). It is hard to escape the impression that this 'we' that Sartre refers to remains the bourgeois writer, no longer writing for the bourgeoisie alone, as Sartre characterises the situation of the seventeenth-century writer, but nevertheless: 'We were born into the bourgeoisie' (p. 205).

Worst still, there is a despondency that characterises Sartrean reading: 'we do not have the crazy ambition of influencing the State Department, but rather the slightly less crazy one of acting upon the opinion of our fellow citizens' (p. 212). It remains a question of telling the reader what to think, what to opine, and the only activity that reading elicits is that of the reading itself. For all his discussions of freedom, for the Sartre of What is Literature?, reading and writing remain restricted to the world of literary affect: 'The most beautiful book in the world will not save a child from pain' (p. 233).

Althusser

At this point, we can basically summarize the difference between Sartre and Althusser's approaches to reading in the following way: On the one hand, a quasi-Marxist, humanist attempt to describe the experience of reading. On the other, an anti-, or a-humanist, attempt to read Marx. Whilst Althusser's proclamations regarding his conception of reading must be taken in the specific context of his work on Marx, it is quite clear that Althusser also tries to instigate an entirely new approach to the understanding of reading more generally. He argues that in Marx 'we note that not only in what he says but in what he does we can grasp the transition from an earlier idea and practice of reading to a new practice of reading, and to a theory of history capable of providing us with a new theory of reading' (Reading Capital, p. 18). Arguably, this is precisely what Sartre attempted to do, without, however, managing to escape from the language of the 'essence' of the text, of a certain kind of 'myth', of literature and of a supposed community of readers. How then does Althusser attempt to describe his understanding of this new theory of reading? What must we escape from before we can understand in what it might consist? Althusser replies:

To break with the religious myth of reading: with Marx this theoretical necessity took precisely the form of a rupture with the Hegelian conception of the whole as a 'spiritual' totality, to be precise, as an expressive totality. It is no accident that when we turn the thin sheet of the theory of reading, we discover beneath it a theory of expression, and that we discover this theory of expressive totality ... to be the theory which, in Hegel, for the last time and on the terrain of history itself, assembled all the complementary religious myths of the voice (the Logos) speaking in the sequences of a discourse; of a Truth that inhabits its Scripture (p. 17).



Rather than endeavouring to trace the effects of a text on a reader, whether passive or active, what Althusser describes as 'symptomatic reading', attempts to precisely read the text against itself, to discern within it that which might constitute its hidden problematic, the one that would not be visible if the text was to be read as already 'full'. Althusser argues against transparency, against idea of an initial transparency of the true, and also against epiphany and parousia – the presence, the revelatory illumination of thought.

Both Hegelian and empiricist readings (and Sartre arguably fits somewhere between the two) attempt to understand reading as direct communication, rather than paying attention to the unconscious of the text, to the very unspoken and initially unclear conditions for the very possibility of its content to emerge. It is the complex relation between the sights – vues – of the texts and its constitutive oversights – bévues, that characterise symptomatic reading for Althusser: the reading that is never the first reading, never the initial impression of a text. It is a machinic, rather than organicist, conception of reading, an attempt to draw out the technical structures that silently shape a text and indicate its real significance for thought. Interestingly, whilst arguing that it is Marx who introduced the question of what it might mean to read into contemporary thought, it is Spinoza that Althusser turns to as the historical precursor for this symptomatic, materialist reading:

The first man ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first man in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true. This explains to us why Marx could not possibly have become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science, and why in the last instance this foundation was consummated in the dissipation of the religious myth of reading (pp. 16-17).



On the basis of this quote, it is clear that the dissolution of the religious myth of reading is the necessary precondition of the dissolution of, what Spinoza calls 'knowledge of the first kind', and what Althusser calls ideology. All that, in effect, forms an epistemic obstacle, to borrow a Bachelardian lexicon, as Althusser so often does, to a reading of a text that pays attention to that which is of key importance. As an aside, we may note that Althusser's use of a Spinozist conception of reading is ultimately quite far from Deleuze and Guattari's own use of Spinoza in their discussions of literature, and here I am thinking of their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus where they too speak of books in machinic terms: 'A book itself is a little machine', it exists 'only through the outside and on the outside' (p. 4). However, Deleuze and Guattari's refusal of the concept of ideology – 'there is no ideology and never has been' - arguably entails a necessarily expressive (though non-Hegelian) account of the affectivity of literature; the very expression and transmission of intensities that Althusser argues against, as we saw above, also on the basis of a Spinozist understanding of reading. Because for Althusser there is necessary opacity to one's first reading of a text, an incomplete and illusory 'first kind of knowledge', there can be no recourse to the language of immediacy, intensity or expressionism, however undead, that is, 'rhizomatic' and 'machinic'. Deleuze and Guattari's account of reading remains too empiricist to be properly attentive to the productive, yet not immediately apparent, force of a text (its political/psychoanalytic dimension). This is another quote from Reading Capital regarding this question of production:

It is therefore a question of producing, in the precise sense of the word, which seems to signify making manifest what is latent, but which really means transforming ... something which in a certain sense already exists. This production ... is the production of a knowledge (p. 34).



To the Hegelian-religious notion of reading there corresponds an empiricist theory of knowledge as vision, as the extraction of an object from the real of vision. To a symptomatic reading there corresponds an idea of knowledge as production. However, somewhat critically, there seems to be a sense in which Althusser's characterization of this Hegelian-religious notion of reading hides a deeper flaw in his own conception. He may well claim that 'there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of' and make provision for his particular account of it by arguing that: 'It is therefore a special reading which exculpates itself as a reading by posing every guilty reading the very question that unmasks its innocence, the mere question of its innocence: what is to be read?' (pp. 14-15). Nevertheless, as Jacques Rancière points out:

The religious-speculative myth of the immediate presence of sense in writing is, for Althusser, what implicitly sustains the naiveties of that empiricism which identifies the words in a book with the concepts of science and the concepts of science with the objects one holds in one's hand (lost the reference for this one, d'oh - probably from La leçon d'Althusser).



In other words, is Althusser too hasty, too wilfully keen to simply elide the 'religious myth' of reading with a kind of naïve empiricism, even if the former must by definition depend upon a conception of transcendence that is constitutively unavailable to the latter? As Rancière further argues:

One readily sees the obvious advantage provided by this handy identification of the religion of the book with the parousia in the book, by coupling from the start religious speculation with naïve empiricism it guarantees the entire chain of equivalences in which economist and the humanist, the opportunist and the leftist will be wisely aligned, the perverse couples symmetrically aligned together and tainted by the same sin.

Althusser is thus guilty of characterising a conception of reading that is not the one held even by those who adhere to a 'religious myth of reading' or to a naïve empiricism. In effect, I would argue, the only person who really understands reading in the way that Althusser negatively depicts it, halfway between empiricism and transcendence, is Sartre, the old enemy, the Marxist who owes more to Hegel and Kierkegaard than he does to Capital. The vexed question of 'reading' is thus nothing other than one strand of the larger question of humanism and its overturning.



Conclusion

What Althusser's understanding of symptomatic reading does is allow us to appreciate the necessity of reading that in a text which is (literally!) not there to be read. Not that which doesn't exist, but that which forms, as he would say, borrowing openly from Lacan, the unconscious of the text. It is a technique picked up most obviously by Foucault, but also by Rancière, which makes his critique of Althusserian reading on Althusserian grounds perhaps most revealing of all. In the wake of Althusser's definition of reading in terms of problematics, epistemic obstacles, and opacity, we can no longer believe that a cursory, revelatory direct impression of a text will suffice for us to understand the conditions of the production of its content. If we are to read carefully, it is because much is at stake – for Althusser it was the attempt to read Marx against all those who would claim his humanist continuity with previous political and economic thinkers – Marx himself read Smith and Ricardo and Hegel symptomatically, Althusser claims at one point, which is precisely why he was able to open up a new 'continent' of thought, namely that of history, understood in an altogether new, and polemical, way. Of course, there is little discussion in Althusser of who readers, symptomatic or otherwise, might be, or what a reading community might look like – precisely those questions that Sartre was so concerned to understand. Of course, Althusser is quite forbidden to pose these questions in this way, as they owe much to a kind of low-level empiricism, or a humanist phenomenology, as we saw in Sartre. Nevertheless, would one want to extend Althusser's analysis, to address the question of the unconscious and the opacities of the reader, above and beyond the unconscious of the text?



If Sartre's conception of reading remains wedded to a humanist-Hegelian, or even Kantian framework, as we saw, it nevertheless attempts to think what an active conception of reading might be, one that would have democratic ramifications in the present. If Sartre fails, it is because there is too much dependency on the transparency of the relations between the author and the reader, and between the reader and the text. Althusser's conception of reading destroys this Sartrean scenario, which clearly does depend upon both the transcendence of the reader in his free activity and on a simple conception of writing that would be necessarily relevant to its epoch, albeit for a finite amount of time. If the discussion of the 'religious myth of reading' in Althusser had a target, it was undoubtedly Sartre, as without destroying the whole edifice of myth and essentialism that accompanies Sartre's description of writing in What is Literature? there would be no way of mounting an alternative reading of reading, one that seeks to indicate the possibility of a truly innovative understanding of a text in all its philosophical and political radicality.

The film list is coming soon - I salvaged all the recommendations from the comments (and emails/other blog links), so none have been lost (incidentally, bacteriagrl, hurry up!). It's taking me a while to work out how to list them (by director? alphabetically?), but once I've got that sorted, I'll post 'em. So perhaps 2007 can be the year in which I finally get round to watching all those films I should have seen in my youth (instead of playing with wooden blocks and reading bloated 80s novels by Updike). It's certainly the year I have to get out of debt and cut down on the wine consumption - it's not a substitute for blood, woman!



This Christmas I have become obsessed to the point of sleeplessness with cryptic crosswords and online games, particularly chess and scrabble. There's something endearingly inhuman about being beaten in a split-second by an undead partner, isn't there? Horrah for zombie game-playing automatons! You'll upset us all, and you won't even care.

In my infinite boredom this xmas, I drew a picture, which I dedicate to the readers of my blog. It is taken from a book I bought for vaguely-pagan Infinite Ma (well, she exorcises the house sometimes) for xmas. The original etching is called Optica, and it's by Franciscus Aguilonius (1611). Cherubs are a f-ing nightmare to do properly - I can't get the right level of smug fatness on their chubby little faces, so they all look a bit too old, and not nearly plump enough. Atlas is also rather overdrawn and looks a bit too much like a cross Santa. Still, it killed a few hours...

After the revolution, all animals will be forced to celebrate Christmas as punishment for having not risen up against us earlier.

Paul McCarthy's Mechanical Pig (2005)

Preface to the A Edition

About a week ago I fell down some concrete steps whilst attempting to catch a train. Despite my ample 'post-rationing' backside, I somehow managed to land instead on my vestigial pig-tail, crushing it rather horribly, and doing some damage that may apparently take months (months!) and some (decidedly unfree) physiotherapy to sort out. It even has a name – coccydynia - though not one that the Biblical Adam would have given it, most likely not being a strong supporter of the theory of evolution (ahem, if I convert to Christianity will God remove all trace of my painful primate-tail?) Incidentally, the word coccyx comes from the Greek for cuckoo (because it looks like a cuckoo's beak, apparently, not because it lays eggs in other nests ... oh my God, that's horrible! Wait…terrible inseminating-migrating-tail sf stories fading, fading...). Pigs, pigs!

Preface to the B Edition

Anyway, a few days later, whilst returning home after, erm, 'some drinks', I somehow miscalculated the status of the moving walkway, not noticing that it wasn't in fact a moving walkway at all, but rather a stationary strip of potentially highly unkind metal. Falling forward, I incurred the imprint of the thing, so now my right knee resembles a popular snack product, namely a bacon fry (that is, the singular of 'bacon fries'). With such amusing porcine-related injuries in mind (and body), I felt it was as good a time as any for a long-overdue 'picture-thinking special' for the xmas period, and to introduce a key philosophical concept into the grand speculative system of Infinite Thought, namely 'the Transcendental Pig'.

Introduction

Who or what is the transcendental pig, I hear you squeal before being gently led off to the conceptual abattoir? As this is a properly Kantian endeavour, we must first establish the conditions for any possible experience of the pig. I have deduced that these fall into three main areas: economic, social and psychoanalytic. These three concepts comprise, and indeed, exhaust the pig architectonic. There can be no appeal to the 'transcendent pig', of course, though we can postulate porcine intuition as part of a limiting exercise in the comprehension of our own intuition, which is of course sensible and longpigish. Furthermore, it should be added that Reason pushes us to go beyond its use in experience and imagine three things: the freedom of the pig-will; the immortality of the pig-soul; and the existence of the pig-God. With this empty, though necessary, structure in place, we can plough every thought-field with the cognitive assurance that once we have completed our critical task, porcine metaphysics can once again reclaim its rightful place as Queen of the sciences, and reclaim all talk of pigs from the filthy paws of vegan barbarians, dogmatic pub-snack manufacturers, pig-sceptics, hippie-nomads who think that pigs are straightforwardly in harmony with us, pig-indifferent fatalists, pork-unbelievers, and uncritical enthusiasts of the pig.

The Economic Pig (in Pig Latin: porcus economicus)

Engels was famously not a friend of pigs, mistaking them as he did for Irish people. This is taken from The Condition of the Working Class in England:

'It often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed: often a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in a indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, apathy, and wretchedness ... To these and other sources of disease must be added that pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind were found' (pp. 101-102, Penguin edition).

Further:

'the Englishman who is still somewhat civilised needs more than the Irishman who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty' (p. 112).

The Irish just are pigs. Furthermore, they are grotesque, demanding brutes with ideas far above their lowly, muck-ridden, station: 'What does such a race want with high wages?' (Engels genuinely asks this question, like some kind of proto-Nazi – it's on p. 124). They might as well sleep with pigs, the horrible dirty things!

As, in fact, they do:

'[The Irishman] builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself.'



But the flip-side of Engels' transcendental horror at the Irish-pig assemblage is not simply the realisation that the Irish are pigs, but also that they are fuck-pigs. This is evidenced by the ménage-a-trois he had in the 1840s and 1850s with Mary and Lydia Burns, Proletarian Irish sisters, with whom Engels no doubt ate potatoes, rutted like beasts, all the while coated with copious amounts of the 'filth and drunkenness that [the Irish] have brought with them'. Is not the 24-year-old Engels' fascinated disgust with the pig-related 'other disgusting things' a displacement not merely of his prejudice against the Irish, but of all his residual bourgeois shame? Doubled is his conflation of pigs with Irish immigrants, but also in the doubling of his relation with the red-headed, illiterate Irish sisters who no doubt taught the judgemental lad a thing or two, as well as any pig could have.

This excursus may in fact legitimately be placed under the psychoanalytic pig wing of this critical enterprise, but the key point here is that Engels is not primarily libidinally-confused, but also economically, as pigs are actually the most proletarian of animals. 'Every peasant has his pig' writes W H Pyne in his Microcosm: Or A Picturesque Delineation of the Arts, Agriculture, Manufactures, etc. of Great Britain (1806-8).



Not only do pigs eat all the stuff no other animal would touch, but they manage through the wonders of their genetic makeup to make things like pork pies and scotch eggs taste great, even if technically they are constituted of transmuted saw-dust and curds. It is this fear of the magically ability of the pig to make itself taste nice even though its diet is a pile of jetsam, that lies at the heart of all religious prohibitions against the animal. 'Consumption of swine-flesh reduces the feeling of shame and as such the standard of modesty' says one Islamic website. Well, it certainly worked for Engels! 'Carrion, running blood and the flesh of swine' are 'unclean' according to the Koran (6:142), and all those mad books of the Old Testament that tell you to stone everything also go on about which cloven-hooved beasts you can ingest: 'And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you' The shared religious prohibition nevertheless tends towards a potentially useful definition of the political pig: Couldn’t we all get along in a shared hatred of the pig?

On the other hand, you don't have to be a believer to hate the pig...

Seasoned snobs like Edmund Burke, who condemned the 'swinish multitude' in his 1790 stuffed-shirt reactionary tract Reflections on the Revolution in France (the source of all depictions of the French as crazy anarchoid revolutionaries, incidentally) found himself the target of various pro-democratic pamphlets critical of oligarchies with titles like 'Rights of Swine'. Indeed – it is perhaps only when we accept that we are indeed to live and think like pigs, as Gilles Châtelet once argued (albeit critically), then we can truly accept that the pig is the most generic of animals, and as such, the very paradigm of a militant engagement with the swill-trough that is the world...Think, pig!

The Social Pig (in Pig Latin: porcus sensus communis)

At some point in the 1960s and 1970s, Men with beards launched a kind of pocine anti-jihad against the encroachment into the English countryside of massive quantities of Islamisation, the belief being that through a combination of scrumpy and pigs the Islamic threat could be eliminated. This led to the creation of the 'prog pig', most famously incorporated into Pink Floyd's image of the pig floating over Battersea Power Station (and resurrected in the recent great film, Children of Men). Flights were cancelled in 1976 (well, some of them) as the pig flew free of its moorings during the photoshoot. Who needs fog?



The pig is not merely a cottage animal. Equally at home in the slurry of Wiltshire (and how the stench of pig farms remind me of my childhood) or the scraps of the city, the pig is a rural-urban force of untold proportion. Nevertheless, if the pig belongs in the collective imagination, it is in the countryside, amongst buttercups and the casual ingestion of magic mushrooms, that we visualise it most clearly.

The prog pig is a key symbol in the attempt to preserve something of the domestic surrealism of the British countryside. It is the bestial cornerstone of the rural reconstruction of an age in which men belonged to Pig Clubs (set up in order to provide for those who lost their animal to sickness or accident, but also the site of male bonding, drinking and celebration, as in the famous annual Pig Club banquets), where the most fun to be had on a Sunday afternoon was petting your neighbour’s pig. Our very own Roger Scruton, a modern-day Burke, excels in his extolling of the virtues of the animal:

'The pig was created for the table ... he has translucent sensitive skin which bears witness to the abundant sweet flesh beneath it. His eyes are half-closed, emitting no doe-eyed glances with which to stay the hand of his executioner ... He also looks like food: a round, plump offering on sticks, ready at any moment to lose his individuality and slide down the metaphysical ladder from thing to stuff' (News from Somewhere, p. 84).

Scruton also appreciates the social elements of man-pig interaction: 'Although their conversation is limited, it compares favourably with today’s school-leavers, and their simple pleasure in being scratched being the ears is an equal pleasure in the one who causes it.'

Like some grand elbow-patched jocular uncle with a big book collection, Scruton in his transmigration to the wilds of Wiltshire mimics with great delicacy the movement of Sus scrofa domesticus across this great and silly land. Let us join with Scruton in the grand scratching of pigs' ears.

The Psychoanalytic Pig (in Pig Latin: piggus split-subjectivus)

The pig is a clever beast. Unfortunately we usually kill them off before they get smart. As Erasmus Darwin put it: 'I have observed great sagacity in swine; but the short lives we allow them, and their general confinement, prevents their improvement, which might probably be otherwise greater than that of dogs.' (quoted in The English Pig, p. 14). And Dr Johnson, who nevertheless spent bloody ages being written about by a man, said the following: 'the pigs are a race unjustly calumniated. Pig has, it seems, not been wanting to man, but man to pig.'



We kill and eat them young because Pigs disturb us, intellectually and sexually (er, probably). The very pinkness of the classical pig reminds us far more of our proximity to animals than hirsute primates. And if women are supposed to be more hairless than men, then the faint bristles of the overwhelmingly rose-coloured beast (not to mention the lack of pubic hair) mean that female pigs might even make better women than women themselves (dates aside, the coupling of John Ruskin and a lady-pig might have made a nice topic for a Joshua Reynolds painting). Their internal organs also resemble ours and we can use their cells for making insulin. They are also far less likely to crush us to death, not like those great hulking ejits, cows. They are also not so manifestly stupid and evil as ducks, geese, chickens, goats and sheep. Is it a coincidence that the Cary Grant of our times, George Clooney, cries more for Max, his pot-bellied pig ('the longest relationship of my life'), as he will ever do over any two-bit Hollywood starlet? Somehow, I think not...



The overt perverse sexuality of Miss Piggy (the Princess that turns her prince into a neurotic frog) testifies to the grotesque charm of the Female Pig, a theme explored in great detail in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformations which attempts to detail the sexual allure and horror of the femme-pig (it’s one of the best novels of the 1990s for this reason, whatever the New York Times says. Incidentally, I once recommended it to a friend who got so angry with me for doing so, she spent an evening screaming at me before she drank herself into unconsciousness. Truly the mark of a worthy novel!). The gradual transformation of the heroine into a snuffling porcine object, desirable precisely because she is a dumb pig with a big arse, tells you everything you need to know about what capitalism and proto-fascism would like women to be (Le Pen eventually uses the beauty-counter-salesgirl-turned-pig-woman as a poster girl).

Until we understand the transcendental pig, we will go on uncritically eating ham sandwiches and blithely comparing pigs to capitalists. What we have to understand, as a matter of some urgency, is that the transcendental pig is our friend, just as the empirical pig is our lunch.

Out on the town, Daniel once again throws down the contrarian gauntlet (sometimes he does this in his best Zizek voice): 'perhaps Hitchens is right. Perhaps women aren't funny, but maybe this is for similar reasons that they can't be friends under capitalism.'

Hitchens' 'provocative' piece has been dealt with already over at Lenin's Tomb, but in all the criticisms of Hitchens' blatant idiocy, I can't find anyone who points to the real claims of his argument. One limited (if correct) response to Hitchens' claim would be to point to real, empirical women who are genuinely funny (this is what Dennis Perrin, for example, does extremely well). But the basis for Hitchens' argument is far stranger. He essentially claims that:

1. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing women. (Women, conversely, don't need to impress men because they are somehow always already 'appealing').

And most confusedly, that

2. Men suffer nature most severely: 'Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch'.

But also that

3. Women suffer nature most severely: 'Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous'.

So childbirth, or at least its hypothetical possibility, is the major reason for women's supposed humourlessness, the 'agony and death' that women flirt with in the quest for motherhood (as put most coldly in the article, 'one pathetically small coffin, and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin'). Apart from the fact that it seems rather unlikely that the majority of women (childless or otherwise) spend their entire existence (or even a large part of it) ruminating about their wombs, Hitchens gives no reason, or argument (or joke even), to try to explain the necessary connection between the capacity to reproduce - which is certainly not the defining characteristic of pre-pubescent, post-menopausal, infertile, women of which there are many - and one's capacity to laugh or to, you know, amuse.



The closest we get is the claim that: 'women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing' as men. Again the temptation would here be to give empirical counterexamples - as if it wasn't understood that it is completely absurd that one must bleed like a harpooned whale for several days every month, or that women's arses stick out so in-itself-ishly and that breasts jiggle up and down when you run. These things are just hilarious goes without saying. As does the fact that nuns have much higher rates of breast cancer because they don't have children (although much lower rates of cervical cancer because they don't have sex) - just another cute example of the non-stop riot-o-rama that is female biology.

Even the Bible, for fuck's sake, makes a kind of joke about the relative shittiness of femme-biology. When Adam and Eve go all Enlightenment and eat the knowledge-apple (pre-Newtonian!), God says 'Unto the woman...I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children' (Genesis 3:16). Adam, on the other hand, merely has to eat some thistles. Go God!



The Greeks are, as usual, a bit more subtle. Tiresias (in post-female incarnation) betrays Hera by telling Zeus that women enjoy some nine-tenths of the pleasure, for which she rather unkindly blinds him. Whether this is 'true' or not (and see antigram for some discussion of this, and the idiocy of wanting to found a politics on female orgasm; also Glueboot a while back put it as: 'I like being a woman, and not only because we have better orgasms. Men are crap'), it tells us nothing about comedy, or of any link between the biological and the humorous.

Comedy, as Bergson will never ever tell us ('We regard it, above all, as a living thing'), has nothing to do with bodies, even in its physical modalities (slapstick, penis-puppetry, whatever). Laughter does not have a primarily social function, as Bergson claims, but rather a intra-linguistic one. Comedy is language laughing at itself through the medium of words. If women are 'less funny' than men, it's because language is stupid.

Mark (forever) k-punk brilliant on pseudonyms, 'real' names and the intense shame of nomination.

Shameless practical apology to all unanswered emails - I love you all (silence is not a negative judgement).

Jenny - Georgia O'Keeffe couldn't have said it better!

Ha, and no comments boxes for some boring bastard to tell me off for being immature - this surely is the best of all possible worlds!

That's Dr Pig to you, punk!

It's a shame Pinochet didn't die in the arms of Thatcher (or with his flaccid cock in her mouth, as Daniel would have preferred), but oh well.

Viktor Bulla, Pioneers in defense drill, Leningrad, 1937


Pandas born at Wolong, 2006

Last night I had a dream which contained a small artificial, warm, mechanical pig in a skirt with the word 'signage' printed on it.

No more confessionals; no more comments. Apologies - once again - to all those who wrote in the spirit of generosity.

One of the more stupid things I've done of late - and believe me there have been a litany - was to somehow, unbelievably, ridiculously forget to save the very final version of my PhD. This is not totally awful, in the sense that I have already submitted, but is extremely stupid in the sense that I didn't have time to print my own copy out before the terribly unstable ancient laptop I was using recently packed up and died.

Left with the image of turning up to my own viva empty-handed (page what? what argument? section huh?), I was contemplating ringing up one of my examiners and asking him if I could photocopy the damn thing (assuming he hadn't already covered it in big red crosses and 'NO!'s).

But, horrah! Joy of joys, it slipped my mind that I had sent a copy of the whole thing to one person - the dark Prince - so all is well. I have it back. But how tenuous, how utterly, utterly idiotic of me. It's almost as if the one thing you really shouldn't do becomes the only thing you actually do...there must be a name for this kind of thing...

It very much looks as though there's a kind of scrap about Dawkins going on at Voyou involving Tim, K-Punk and A. C. Grayling. Blimey.

Infinite gratitude for all the film suggestions - am quite overwhelmed and impressed by all the list-immediacy and intense variety. Will be drawing up the master-list in the next couple of days...

Dear lovely readership,

IT has a ridiculously inadequate knowledge of cinema. The reasons behind this (a screenless upbringing in the wilds of Wiltshire, an attention span close to that of an anxious meerkat and a feeling of resentment whenever forced to do anything remotely passive) are uninteresting.

What I want to do now is to watch the films I should see on my days off - and I need your help! A list of 10 or 20 films that you would recommend as all time cine-necessities.

Lists in the comments please! If by chance I've seen any of them, I'll strike them off and you can replace them. I'll then draw up a film-watching schedule on the basis of your recommendations. Horrah!